BeardyTom wrote:Well, it's been kind of a slow day at work, so here's my effort at a Christmas song. Cue the sleighbells.(P.S.If someone could give me a hint about PaulyG's code, that would be nice. I'm getting nowhere.)

That's terrific, Tom. Though, personally, I find the final verse a bit far-fetched.

Struggling still, even assuming the keyword is actually 'search' (which it's not forced to be).

Have tried going through the string ('pardgps' etc) shifting each (non-space) character by an amount (0 to 25) based on the corresponding character in the keyword (which I'm assuming is 'search'). So, 'p' is shifted by 's'; 'a' is shifted by 'e' ... the 7th letter of the string 'r' is shifted by 's' (back to the start of the keyword). Found nothing so far. I even tried adding a fixed caeser shift on top of the keyword shift (which I've tried adding and subtracting). Found nothing. Also tried a few online decryption tools. Nothing again. Wondering if the keyword isn't 'search'?

I'm rubbish at deciphering codes, I haven't made any attempt with any of Saint "Tricky" Nick's puzzles in this thread, but my instant assumption as to his last post was that the keyword was "google". But I'm not sure Santa would risk such partisan endorsement of one particular search engine over the alternatives....

We don't know that the spaces are correctly positioned either. I found this one on the internets (the number of characters per 'word' in the encrypted string, do not correlate with the number of characters per word in the decoded string)...

I just wanted to say a big thank you to my Santa for The Little Prince: Make Me a Planet

I'd never heard of it - but PaulyG within minutes was telling me about how amazing the two designers on it are and everything else they'd ever done and what its rating was on BoardGameGeek, so I was quite excited to give it a go. I love the nice building theme, with player interaction but nothing too mean, and interesting scoring. And the cute animals.We played it tonight, and it works well as a two player, it's very quick and lots of fun, and I think will be played again lots. And I think I'll be looking at the other games within the series.

I have no idea who you are, but would love to know as I hate unknown things and want to say thank you properly. So I think we need this thread to continue with everyone sharing what they got, and who got it for them so I can narrow it down!! But I think you know a lot about board games, and that you have board game playing age kids.